Dave Bonta's "Remodeling" turns a building site into a bar in four short lines. A speaker stands amid the mess left by bricklayers and, instead of complaining about the dust, lifts a toast to it. The central idea is that disruption, which most of us put up with only because we want the result, can be savored in itself. Change is something to drink in.
The grammar is the first thing to notice. The poem opens with "drinking in," a participle with no subject attached. We never learn who is drinking, only that the drinking is happening. That makes the speaker almost disappear into the activity, as if the person were as unfinished as the room. The phrase also works two ways. "Drinking in" is the idiom for soaking up a scene with eager attention, but the second stanza makes the literal sense come true with "a glass." The line break after "in" gives the word a second life too, since the speaker is both absorbing the scene and sitting *in* the house being torn up. That second reading is an inference, but the title makes it a natural one.
The second line is the poem's longest and heaviest: "the disorder the bricklayers have made." There is no "that" to ease the clause, so "disorder" and "the bricklayers" collide, and the line tumbles forward without a pause. It also holds the poem's quiet paradox. Bricklaying is a trade of straight courses and plumb lines, the work of putting things in order. Yet what the bricklayers have *made* is disorder. The present perfect "have made" suggests they have only just finished, or are still at it. Order is being built out of chaos, and the speaker sits in the middle stage and refuses to hurry past it.
The second stanza turns from observation to ceremony. "To it to them a glass / of alteration" is the language of a toast, and the missing commas make it sound rushed and a little giddy, as though the cheers are spilling out before the speaker can organize them. "To it" could point to the disorder, the house, or the whole process, and the vagueness lets all three in. "To them" is clearer: it honors the workers, the people who made the mess. The line break after "a glass" holds the cup in the air for a moment before "of alteration" fills it. What is poured is an abstraction, not wine or whisky but change itself, and the poem asks us to taste it.
"Alteration" is a well-chosen word. Its root, "alter," also describes what a drink does to a person, and anyone who has had a glass too many knows the altered state. The speaker drinks to change and is changed by drinking. The word also sounds a little like "altar," and the toast does have something of a small ritual about it, though that echo is a matter of sound and not something the poem states. Beside the plain, concrete "bricklayers" and "glass," "alteration" is long and Latinate, a word that sounds like paperwork. Offering it as a drink is quietly funny.
There is no rhyme, and no punctuation or capital letters at all. The poem looks as though it has been through its own remodeling, with the usual scaffolding of commas and full stops stripped away. The sentence in the first stanza is never finished in the standard way, and the second stanza is a fragment as well. Nothing is tidy, and that fits the subject. A neater, fully punctuated version would be a poem about disorder that refused to share any of it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes an ordinary domestic annoyance and gives it the dignity of a celebration without any solemnity. It is easy to read the lines as being about a house, and just as easy to read them as being about any season of life when things are torn up before they are put right. The poem doesn't claim the mess is pleasant, only that it is worth raising a glass to.